Green Groups' Attack On Fracking Based On Bad Science

Energy: After admitting there's no documented evidence of groundwater contamination due to a technique used to extract oil and gas from shale, the EPA tries to manufacture a crisis in Wyoming.

At a House Oversight Committee hearing in May, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson confirmed that, despite fears that hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as "fracking," would lead to contamination of ground water, there was no independently documented instances that it had occurred.

Jackson told the committee: "I'm not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water."

Suddenly the liberal group Pro Publica is shouting from the proverbial rooftops that fracking is a threat to humanity, and that it has been documented by an EPA draft report released last Thursday. That report said chemicals "likely" associated with fracking were found at a site in Pavillion, Wyo., where EPA monitoring wells were drilled.

First, the contamination was found in two "monitoring wells" drilled by EPA outside of town, not in water wells that actually supply residents their water. Of those water wells, the EPA draft report said it "re-tested private and public drinking wells in the community" and said chemical levels were "generally below health and safety standards" — that is, below levels considered risks to public health. The water was safe to drink.

Suspicions have been raised that the problem may be in how and where the EPA drilled its monitoring wells and not with hydraulic fracturing per se. EPA use of "dense soda ash" to drill its monitoring wells into a hydrocarbon-bearing layer could have skewed the results.

According to the industry research group Energy in Depth, "dense soda ash has a recorded pH (11.5), very similar to the level found in the deep wells, creating the possibility that the high pH recorded by EPA could have been caused by the very chemicals it used to drill its own wells."

The U.S. Geological Survey has found that water quality in the region is "highly variable" due to its natural geological characteristics and that the area in recent years featured unusually high levels of pesticide and significant drainage problems. It also noted that high concentrations of potassium and chloride have been detected in Pavillion-area groundwater for more than 20 years.

It is worth noting that the potassium levels detected in EPA's first monitoring well fell by more than 50% from October 2010 to April 2011, while potassium in EPA's second monitoring well rose over the same period. That strongly suggests natural variations, not fracking.

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